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Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?

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Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?

#51

Post by KronisLV »

A while ago I tried finding a nice RSS reader that would be detached from the browser, but didn't find too many nice options out there.

But as it turns out, Thunderbird actually has a built in feed reader, which now nicely aggregates both my e-mails, spam e-mails and both news that I might care about as well as the ones I don't. So the experience is very similar to dealing with e-mails - occasional items that I care about amongst others that I don't, even if some of the others are useful as well, and having all of that in the same application makes a lot of sense!

Here's an example: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/05/thunderbird-rss-feeds-g...

I even added an RSS feed to my own blog which can now tell anyone who cares about that stuff about new articles.

In addition, I'm subscribed to some feeds that pull data from HN so I don't miss like 90% of my comment responses, as well as a "Jobs" feed for the "Who's Hiring?" posts.

I currently use this for HN: https://hnrss.github.io/

It feels like RSS is a nice solution for releases of articles and such, I wonder why we don't see too much of it anymore nowadays, though someone would probably claim that it has something to do with ads.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?

#52

Post by brycewray »

Yep, am both a consumer (via the NetNewsWire app[0]) and publisher thereof. It's how I keep up during the day with not only HN but also updates to a number of GitHub-based projects I watch, not to mention YouTube video feeds by a variety of devs (or dev-friendly creators), tech blogs, etc.

[0]: https://netnewswire.com/

Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?

#53

Post by manicdee »

Main issue I have is systems that don’t keep RSS feeds in sync with actual content, and remembering that editing existing content shouldn’t result in a new RSS entry for that edited content.

As an example one group I am involved in tried sharing a calendar via RSS but every time they created a new appointment they would copy an old one, update the description, update the headline, then change the invite list and meeting time. Each action resulted in a new record being added to the RSS feed.

Cache invalidation is hard, apparently.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?

#54

Post by heywoodlh »

supersparrow wrote: post #47

Absolutely! It's the only way I get my news. I have FreshRSS self-hosted on a Pi with an nginx reverse proxy front end. I either access it from the FreshRSS web UI or from Reeder on my phone. It's also the main way I use HN - I probably click into more HN threads than news articles these days.

I also use FreshRSS + Reeder on my phone (and that is my primary

I also self-host Nitter (Twitter front-end), Bibliogram (Instagram front-end), and Teddit (Reddit front-end). Each of these server applications allow me to subscribe to social media feeds without having accounts.

Additionally, I self-host RSSHub for a ton of other integrations, but mostly Youtube subscriptions. Using RSSHub for Youtube subscriptions is nice because I can watch ad-free Youtube videos in Reeder when content creators drop new videos.

EDIT: on desktop (Linux, MacOS) I use Newsboat with FreshRSS.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?

#55

Post by Thristle »

Yeah.

Other than for news and stuff i have a google apps script that uses my RSS feeds to add new youtube videos to specific playlists I have.

Since youtube's "subscriptions" page became so bad in the past years that script is a must

Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?

#56

Post by saltymimir »

It's my go-to way of subscribing to blogs / news feed. For every subscription, with some automations, I fetch the newest item(s) once every day and put the content of each item in a markdown file within a cloud storage that syncs to my devices. I can then read those feeds from any markdown editor. If I feel like I'm done with a post, I can just delete it from the folder.

The only pain point I can think of has more to do with feeds getting completely re-built from scratch. Haven't quite figured out a way to de-duplicate repeat feeds when that happens.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?

#57

Post by pteetor »

I've worked for corporations that need to generate reports and distribute them internally. I created an RSS feed on the report generation machine, then asked users to subscribe to the feed within Microsoft Outlook. That worked well because users are often in Outlook. They would see the RSS notification and think, "Hey! Look! A new report!". (Well, maybe not that enthusiastically.)

Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?

#58

Post by headbee »

That's how I got to this question. I went through the usual guantlet of finding a self-hosted RSS app I liked as well as exploring freemium options and eventually settled on Inoreader. The "plus" tier is ~2USD/mo and is cheaper than what it would cost to host my own, and is overall one of the better readers.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?

#59

Post by danaris »

supersparrow wrote: post #47

Absolutely! It's the only way I get my news. I have FreshRSS self-hosted on a Pi with an nginx reverse proxy front end. I either access it from the FreshRSS web UI or from Reeder on my phone. It's also the main way I use HN - I probably click into more HN threads than news articles these days.

> It's also the main way I use HN - I probably click into more HN threads than news articles these days.

Seconded.

My personal setup is a tt-rss instance set up on my personal server, with a Fever plugin, which allows me to use it with other readers—currently ReadKit on my Mac, and Reeder on iOS. I very rarely access my tt-rss webpage directly; it's just there to provide centralized-under-my-control syncing of the feeds and their read status.

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